So, it’s monday again. The weekend was way too short again, as it tends to be, the autumn weather has clocked in, and there are more days with rain, the incessant heat is over. So life is pretty decent that way. I think I need a day off, but the weather is rather uncertain, so I’m not quite sure if I will manage to get myself to do it.

Books

I finished off The Pirate Captains Daughter, and it was a quite good story, it felt a bit rushed being a novella, but at least it was feeling quite satisfying through the end, which was nice.

The other one for this week was The Tracker’s Dilemma which was good, I’d say even almost one of my favourites in the series, it was a fun story, and some characters who were pretty different from the other ones. The relationship through the story was quite a lot of fun, and it was nice to get to know the last of the girls in the starting group as well.

And then the series was capped off with the novella Quashi which was pretty sweet in it’s way, but it felt kind of lacking in comparison with the rest of the series in others. It felt like it was a story that wanted to be longer, but they didn’t have the space for it, and in the end the whole story was capped off with kind of a whimper.

All in all, I really enjoyed the whole Mandrake Company series, as you probably would guess from me reading the whole thing pretty fast, and focusing on a single series. It was a fun series of books that were different enough to not get tiring, and I enjoyed most of the characters, all in all a fun series of reads.

As my first read after the series I decided to reread a favourite of mine Eclipse the Moon By Jessie Mihalik, and so far I enjoyed the first part a lot, still have the last 100 or so pages to read, but I also remember that the second third of the book was one that I’m not a big fan of, this one is a bit more uneven than I remember it being, but it’s still one that I’m having a lot of fun with. And it’s really nice to see a neuro divergent character treated really well in a story, which is nice.

I’m thinking of rereading her consortium rebellium series next, as I remember enjoying that one quite a lot when I read it, and it’s a while now, it feels like the autumn kind of is the time of comfort reads in general, so better just go with the feeling and keep to it I think.

Games

I wanted something that I didn’t know to play, so this weekend I got Dungeon Encounters, I usually like the a bit weirder experiments, and this one is pretty minimalistic in it’s style. I really enjoy the simple style of both the graphics, and how characters and so are built, rather than having a ton of stats and attacks those are mostly just gathered by the equipment they wear, and they basically just are a collection of their HP and carrying capacity. The Labyrinth of caves are a grid of tiles, and events and monsters just a hex-number on a tile, and that’s it. I’m really enjoying myself with the couple of hours I have given it so far, it’s fun dungeon crawling, the battling is nice, it feels like this can become a comfort game for me. A really good first impression at least.

I’ve been tinkering some more with Rift of the Necrodancer and this game is still really enjoyable, I’m slowly getting my way through the hard songs, and boy, some of them are really quite tricky to get. It’s really nice that the hard songs in this one actually are pretty hard, generally in games it’s really not, the impossible songs really feel impossible, but should be doable once I maybe manage to struggle through all the hard ones and really get the patterns and rhythms under my fingers. I also tried out some rounds on remix mode on the normal difficulty, and it was quite a lot of fun as well, it feels like they did a good job on making it feel kind of weird to replay old songs, but at the same time, with repeating patterns and stuff like in the normal mode, so that you can get kind of into the comfortable groove of the song, rather than having to constantly be sight reading, which is nice. This is still a really great game.

I did play a tiny bit of Euro Truck Simulator 2 as well, finally got my first own truck, and a bit more playing, but I found it kind of hard to get into the mood of it this week, so I didn’t force it, this is a really fun game to play, but if you’re in kind of a restless mood, it really doesn’t work that well for me at least, and I just did a couple of deliveries, and left it at that.

And in between I did manage to do some more picross in Picross S+ it’s just a nice thing to do some of them, nice and calming, and just enough thinking that my pattern seeking mind gets happy. Picross season is in, and I’ll just go with the flow of it.

Misc

I’m still working on getting back to a decent playlist in my podcasting app, and slowly I’m getting there, I’ve been a bit more savage at culling things that aren’t interesting to me at the moment, and I think I’m now just about 2 weeks behind, barring some more really long episodes coming along, I probably will get there in a bit, and then I can start putting in some backlog stuff again, which is nice, I’m still having quite a lot of into the aether to listen to to have all of their episodes listened to.

I was trying to keep a bit more out and ignore some of the constant AI stories coming out, I’m starting to get really burned out on the topic, and need a bit more rest before I can really be enraged about it again, for now, I just am not in a mood where I want to give it too much time and energy. I just wish this whole thing would finally pop, and we’ll get rid of it, but sadly when that happens another fad will come up that’s even more set on destroying life and the planet. I’m just really not feeling it at the moment. Hopefully my indignancy will come back with time. I just can’t muster the rage at the moment.

Kind of tired after a weekend that felt way too short, hopefully I will get a bit more sleep this week, and a bit better sleep, it feels like I’m still grabbing back some of the bad nights of summer where it was almost impossible to sleep, and I feel constantly a bit too tired, at the same time, not really getting to fall asleep when night comes, I guess there is some kind of inner turmoil that is currently stewing, I hope the mind gets itself sorted out so that I don’t have to keep going around being in this half tired state most of the time. But we’ll see how it goes.